The lives of others in runic inscriptions

Martin Findell, Research Associate, University of Leicester

Gold finger-ring, engraved with a runic inscription. Late Anglo-Saxon, found in Cumbria, England. OA.10262

Call it perversity, but in my own research I’ve always had a taste for the unfashionable and the unglamorous areas of runic writing. I get more excited about a name scratched onto the back of a brooch than about a large and richly decorated runestone; and as a historical linguist, I take more pleasure in trying to work out problems of the relationship between spelling, speech and the changing structure of language than in broader questions of cultural history and society. Of course the two are interdependent, and while I concern myself with the troublesome nuts-and-bolts details of language, language is an aspect of culture and must be studied alongside other aspects of culture. Even the briefest and most unattractive inscription is an instance of language use by real people who belonged to a community in which the act of writing had some purpose. Rather than regale you with tales of unstressed vowels, I thought it would be more interesting to share my interest in some of the texts we find written in runes, and what they might tell us about the people who produced them.

One of the most impressive objects in the Vikings exhibition (if somewhat overshadowed by the great Roskilde ship) is a replica of the Jelling stone. The original is at the large royal complex at Jelling in southern Denmark, and was commissioned by Harald Bluetooth to honour his parents and boast of his own achievements. The inscription says “King Harald ordered this monument made in memory of Gorm his father and Þorvi his mother; that Harald who won for himself all of Denmark and Norway, and who made the Danes Christian” (translation based on that in the Samnordisk rundatabas).

The memorial text is formulaic, and similar to inscriptions found all over Viking-Age Scandinavia (with a particular concentration in the Uppland region of Sweden, where several thousand have been found). The stone is probably best seen as a political statement, particularly when it comes to Harald’s display of his Christian credentials; lest the viewer be left in any doubt, one face of the stone is carved with an image of the Crucifixion.

The Jelling stone is an inscription made for a king, but not by him. The people who did the actual work – and importantly for linguists, these were probably also the people who made decisions about things like spelling – were craftsmen, possibly attached to Harald’s court, who remain silent in the historical record.

One of my favourite inscriptions lies at the other end of the scale: a short, personal message, informally scratched on the back of a brooch found in a sixth-century woman’s grave at Bad Krozingen in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The inscription reads boba:leub agirike, “Bōba, dear to Agirik”. Bōba is the name of a woman, perhaps that of the woman buried with the brooch (although not necessarily – valuable pieces of jewellery like this could be passed on as heirlooms, or looted and given to someone other than the original owner), and Agirik is a man. It is likely that he wrote the inscription himself – it is not a work of professional craftsmanship (which the brooch certainly is), and the fact that the message is on the back of the brooch means that it would not have been visible when worn. We have no way of knowing what the relationship between these two people was. They might have been husband and wife, father and daughter, brother and sister, or related in some other way; but this slender piece of evidence helps to remind us that these were real people, people who knew and cared for one another. It might not tell us much about the large-scale political and religious trends of the society in which they lived, but it brings both the words and objects of the past to life as something familiar, human and all too short-lived.

Martin Findell, Research Associate, University of Leicester. His particular interests are in the problems of understanding the relationship between spelling and sound change in the early Germanic languages, and in the uses and abuses of runes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This post was originally published on the British Museum Press blog. Martin’s book about runic inscriptions has been recently published by British Museum Press and can be found on our online shop.

Hi, According to the Museum’s collection information database, the transliteration of the runes is + ÆRKRIUFLTKRIURIÞONGLÆSTÆPONTOL. This appears to have no meaning, so some scholars have assumed it is magical in intention.

The ring was found by a young man levelling a fence on Greymoor Hill, in Kingmoor, two and a half miles from Carlisle. It passed into the possession of George Hamilton Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen, before 1822. Sometime after 1823 it was given to the Museum. The Earl of Aberdeen was later a Conservative Prime Minister (1852–55).

There is some support for the idea that the inscriptions on the so-called ‘amulet rings’ are magical, and that they may have been intended to prevent or staunch bleeding: a similar sequence of ‘nonsense’-words appears in two manuscript versions of an Old English charm for staunching wounds. There is also a similar inscription on a stick from medieval Bergen, so the ærkriu-formula seems to have had some currency as part of a charm. It’s more than just a random sequence of runes.

Using the Jelling Stone, Harald Bluetooth boasted that he “made the Danes Christian,” but I’m left wondering how long it took the Danes to throw off that yoke. Yes, I live in Denmark, which seems to have every possible Christian holy day as a state holiday. Despite the dwindling of parishioners, many of the state churches have been forced to shut down, forcing their parishioners to go elsewhere and … blah.

At any rate, I just wanted to add a comment here to thank you for posting about these sorts of things. Having seen the Vikings exhibition here in Copenhagen, I was very pleased with all the bits and finds that were on display. One of my only recommendations for other folks planning to go would be to not wait until the very last open weekend to do so!😀 I do hope that the British Museum has a good physical layout for this exhibition, including a helpful way to stop people blocking others’ view of the smaller artefacts.